Whether you have stacks of cooking or home décor magazines, clothing catalogs or gossip weeklies, recycling pages from those periodicals into something beautiful is not only eco-friendly but very craft-craving satisfying.

A Target store recently opened nearby us and I’ve rediscovered the store as a great place to discover cute and affordable home wares, clothing and toys. Here are some items I’ve curated from various departments online.

So I received a somewhat random email from my high school alma mater which contained a list of valentine’s day sentiments written by 6th graders. I picked a few out and turned them into cards. Because why contain Valentine’s day sentiments to only one day of the year.

We recently took a trip to the San Francisco Zoo and as we have been doing for the past few years, our eldest two kids (8 & 5 years old) brought along a camera and a camcorder. These are perhaps the “best” images of the bunch but the process of taking the photos and videos is more important than the end results. They are training their artistic eye, practicing their focus and concentration and learning by trial and error how to manipulate these devices.

The indoor soccer season is drawing to a close for my son and as my husband has been the team coach we are prepping for the last game and a mini-ceremony to celebrate the kids’ hard work and improvement over the last 8 weeks. I created certificates for my husband to hand out to the kids. You can download the template to customize for your personal use. I’ve included soccer, basketball, baseball, football, tennis and volleyball. Enjoy!

My children were quite obsessed with this art project. “Painting” with colored sand captivated their attention for almost 3 straight hours. And the work they produced was beautiful, interesting and smile-inducing.

I know makeup-free selfies are very popular. Consider these photos “makeup-free” toddler selfies. No re-touching, taken on the fly with my smartphone and chronicling the day-to-day grind of my 2 year old.

Toddler attention spans can vary a great deal from child to child, so I cannot guarantee that these two activities will occupy your toddler for hours at a time but I will say that for the few or many minutes she is engaged in these activities, she will be exercising something very important - fine motor skills.